As I sit here on my last and final flight of my journey home, I can sense and feel the sweet presence of God all around. Gazing to my left from the tiny oval shaped window, I see the beauty that is His creation. The light baby blue sky with its perfectly hand painted clouds all over to the rolling hills and mountain tops that seem to go on for ever and ever is His handiwork. Inside the plane as I look around and listen, I can see and even hear in speech that so many of us are foreigners to one another, everyone in their differences in ethnicity and culture but all so tangibly formed and fashioned in the very image of God. All of us fearfully and wonderfully made ya know! This simplicity in this beautiful diverse scenery alone is enough for me to know that He is the wonderful and masterful creator of ALL things.  I Sit in such awe and amazement reflecting on everything and everyone that I have encountered the past few short weeks.  A small team of five crazy, radical lovers of Jesus and myself have been very privileged to travel to the nation of Nepal for some ministry, general outreach, and what we have ordained a Hope Strike for a nation! Right now at this very moment in time there is so much that I feel God is cracking open, and shifting in this land and in the people. I believe this is truly Nepal’s time to “arise and shine” according to Is 60:1&2 “Arise, Shine; for your light has come! And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold the darkness shall cover the earth, and deep darkness the people; but the Lord will rise over you, and His glory will be seen upon you”

 

The heart of God is burning for Nepal. This is a nation that for years and years has labeled themselves a “Hindu nation.” There’s this sense of anything goes concerning false God’s and idol worship and religion itself. A nation where its common to see animals sacrificed to idols in temples daily, where it is common to see demon possession in almost every worship gathering. Seeing and encountering these different experiences seems like an overload to me in my little infinite comfortable American mind, but this IS reality for the people of Nepal, this IS every day life as they know it! I can say that amongst all the evil, it is so beautiful and amazing to see the hand of God at work in the most darkest places of the world. To see so many turning their backs on the false God’s and idols of the land and turning their face’s and hearts to Jesus, the King of the universe! So much took place in this trip, but one day stands out among them all, I call it my “it was all worth it” day. We teamed up with some local Pastors and friends on a Thursday morning to do some evangelism. My preconceived ideas of evangelism that I carried over from the west were already putting me in doubt. See I have gotten chances to “evangelize” in America many times before and really I was not crazy about going out and feeding the poor or passing out free Christian literature to random strangers.  My past western world experiences reminded me of being perhaps mocked or laughed at, or maybe even taken advantage of for my kindness as it had seemed to happen before. I guess I had just not felt called to evangelism or just had too many un-fruitful experiences? Well all of my thoughts and ideas were quickly tossed out the door when I realized how and where, and to whom we were being sent to. We were told we would be hiking up and across a large portion of the Himalayan Mountains. Some of us to the tops to some very remote locations and villages where there would be people and entire families that had never even heard the name Jesus! We were not “hitting the streets” to visit the poor, or just to meet anyone’s immediate needs, but to go and love people who almost literally have no contact with a world outside their village’s. This floored me! I thought to myself, how could this be? With all of our resources out there, and still we have people who have not heard of the truth and Love of God. So here we were in a van driving up dirt roads, which were now mud due to it being the rainy season in Nepal. Every few miles we stopped and dropped a team off to make sure we covered as much ground as possible.  We traveled higher and higher, before I knew it everyone had been dropped off at their assigned destinations except three men and myself. The van pulled over with the driver claiming the van could not physically go any higher up the mountain, so it was all hiking from here on out.  We got out and began trekking up steep cliff walls and through the thick brush straight up the mountain creating our own paths. With various down pours of rain this did not make it any easier to climb, but only worse. This fueled the team even more to press on, knowing there are people out there who need to encounter the true living God. We began to find homes mostly rock and mud made structures where large families lived amongst each other, most never even coming off the mountain for anything. What was up in their villages was all they knew. It all finally set in when we began to meet the many different people. Through translators we would ask them if they knew Jesus, and their response would be no as if we were asking them about an individual who lived on the same mountain. We would share about the amazing agape love that God has for them and His desire to have relationship with them and for them to know Him intimately. We watched eye’s light up! The people began to be intrigued by all of this, interested to know more. We left every home with promised visits to come back to share more in the days to come. To me this was the best part. We were not doing the “repeat after me” prayers with anyone, We were not condemning anyone of their “sin.” We were simply building relationships and sharing the Love of Christ with the un-reached. Making Him attractive to a lost people. Telling of His goodness and all that He is from the place of adoration we have in our hearts. I want this story to challenge other believers that we would get out of the places of comfort for His names sake. There are so many people in this world who do not know the Lord. As the body it is our responsibility to tell them. We are not to leave it on people with church titles to do all the work. We are the body. Together we can see entire cities, and regions and even nations changed forever! Let us never stop contending through worship, prayer and intercession for the lost in Jesus name.
 

 

-Jason Zikovich